1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to the design of integrated circuits and, more particularly, to systems and methods to aid in the design of component interconnections accommodating various design criteria using a probabilistic approach.
2. Related Art
As digital devices (e.g., integrated circuits) have become more complex, including more and more electronic components, better tools are needed to design these devices. In particular, design tools need to be made more efficient just to handle the ever increasing size of the design problems.
One of the biggest concerns in current and future VLSI technology is that interconnect delay is not scaling at the same rate as the device delay. Interconnect delay is becoming more and more dominant. This has led to the consideration of interconnect planning during earlier stages of integrated circuit design than was previously necessary. The interconnect planning includes routing layer assignment, wire width assignment, wire spacing assignment, and repeater planning for each net (i.e., for each interconnection between pins.) These assignments consider timing, area congestion, wire congestion, and power consumption.
While some existing electronic design automation (EDA) tools may be able to provide this kind of functionality, their congestion analysis is usually based on global routing and it poses at least the following two problems: (a) long run time—global routers usually require a great deal of time to find a routing pattern for each net; and (b) tool dependency—the specific routing patterns created by a particular global router are not always reproduced by a different router, that is, interconnect planning based on global routing does not generally predict results which are independent of the routing tool that is used.
It would therefore be desirable to provide systems and methods for planning interconnect routing that reduce the amount of run time required to at least estimate the routing for each net in the design, as well as providing results which are independent of the specific routing tool that is used.